Choosing to go to the Moon in this decade is no longer about putting a man or woman on its surface, but a much grander ambition: to use new technological feats to push lunar exploration further than ever before – and, ultimately, to enable a crewed mission to Mars.
On the evening of 1 April 2026, Artemis II launched from the Kennedy Space Center and, for the first time since Apollo 17 – more than half a century ago – humanity left the safety of low Earth orbit and set its course for the Moon. Artemis II was a nine-day lunar flyby mission and the first crewed flight of NASA’s new programme.
The four astronauts onboard the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by the crew, were NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Each was on an historic voyage: Glover became the first person of colour, Koch the first woman, Hansen the first non-US citizen and Wiseman, at 50, the oldest person to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
Despite the high-tech machinery in mission control and onboard Orion, all four were issued with an Omega Speedmaster X-33 Skywalker, a reminder that in spaceflight, redundancy still matters. Mathematical skill and precise timing helped save Mercury-Atlas 9 and Apollo 13; a reliable timepiece remains more than a symbolic object.
Left: NASA astronaut and Artemis II specialist Christina Koch peers out of a window on the Orion main cabin,
as the spacecraft travels towards the Moon.
Right: Pilot Victor Glover, wearing his Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch, Commander Reid Wiseman
and astronaut Jeremy Heansen onboard the Orion spacecraft.
After a series of technical delays, Artemis II finally launched aboard NASA’s Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket the agency has ever built. Once the boosters separated and the core stage completed its burn, the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage boosted Orion into high Earth orbit.
After post-launch systems checks, Integrity’s European Service Module performed the Trans-Lunar Injection burn, placing Orion on a free-return trajectory around the Moon: a path designed to bring the spacecraft home even in the event of propulsion failure. Over the course of the mission, the crew passed within 4,070 miles of the lunar surface and travelled farther from Earth than any humans since Apollo.
During the lunar flyby on day five, the four astronauts entered a 40-minute communications blackout, among the longest in human spaceflight history. In that silence, cut off from Earth by 2,000 miles of rock, they saw the far side of the Moon, a hemisphere of craters and ancient plains no human eye had viewed directly since the final Apollo missions. They watched an Earthrise and experienced a total solar eclipse from space, all recorded for the first time in high-definition video and made available by NASA for everyone on Earth to witness.
Getting four humans to the Moon and back safely is not simply a question of pointing a rocket upwards. Artemis II could launch only within narrow windows in each lunar cycle; miss one and the spacecraft was grounded until the next month. Its return to Earth made the timing even more exacting.
Left: Earthset captured through an Orion window at 6.41pm EDT, 6 April 2026, during the Artemis to crew’s flyby of the Moon.
Right: The Moon backlit by the Sun during a solar eclipsed, photographed by NASA’s Orion, 6 April 2026.
After Artemis I, NASA’s uncrewed 2022 test flight, engineers discovered unexpected erosion on Orion’s heat shield. Rather than redesign the shield entirely, which would have delayed the programme by years, NASA changed the return profile, abandoning the originally planned skip reentry in favour of a steeper approach. The decision narrowed the launch windows further, but reduced the spacecraft’s time in the most punishing thermal environment. Re-entering at more than 38,000km/h, Orion endured temperatures of around 2,800°C, the fastest atmospheric reentry by a crewed spacecraft since Apollo 17.
This time, the astronauts did not need to rely on the watches on their wrists, but the X-33 offered another layer of safety should things have gone wrong, as they did in 1963 and 1970. Developed with NASA input since the late 1990s, the X-33 combines analogue and digital displays with mission-specific timing functions. It remains the only watch qualified by both NASA and the European Space Agency for space missions. Omega provided the current consignment to the Artemis programme in 2023 and, because of its long-term partnership with NASA, the watches will be used again on Artemis III.
It would be easy to frame Artemis II as a rehearsal for Artemis III, which is planned to land on the Moon, but that would undersell what was accomplished. The mission verified that Orion’s life-support systems can sustain astronauts on long-duration flights and allowed the crew to practise operations essential to future missions, from trajectory adjustments and lunar-distance communications to piloting Orion during key phases of flight. Every system needed for future lunar missions, including propulsion, power, navigation and the European Service Module supplied by ESA, was tested in flight.
There is also a human dimension that goes beyond engineering: two generations have gone by with human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit as a memory, a film or a museum exhibit. Artemis II made the flight to the Moon real again. As Hansen described from the far side: “Looking back at Earth, you really felt like you weren’t in a capsule. You’d been transported to the far side of the Moon. And it really just bent your mind.”
Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego on 10 April 2026, nine days and one hour after launch. The flight path to the Moon, and eventually to Mars, is open again.
Author: Andrew Hildreth
Find a more detailed version of this feature in the summer issue of I-M Inquisitive Minds. Get your copy, HERE.
Lead image: Launch of the Artemis II mission. 1 April 2026.
All images © NASA.
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